Linux distro hopping

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

Was there a time you did linux distro hopping ?
How was it ?
For me, some distro's died after upgrade after some time for no reasonable reason and no way to recover.
 
in 25 years I've been on three.
Mandrake for a brief time, then Slackware, finally Arch for the last umpteen years.
All were fine but I like Arch the best.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Was there a time you did linux distro hopping ?
Click to expand...
Yeah!
  • I started with Ubuntu 6.06 and tried Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu on/off randomly on Intel 950GMA
  • Installed Ubuntu primarily at Windows 10's launch
  • Tried Arch for 2 installs, Solus, some other distros, but found Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE TW for my primary distros
  • Ran rolling servers for a while openSUSE TW, but got bored of rolling (everything updated/worked fine regardless; just boring long-term :p) and went with Fedora (was also interested in SELinux)
  • Used every Fedora 22-42, but started looking at other OSs around Fedora 38/39 (unstable GNOME log-in)
  • Started questioning priorities with Linux too much around Fedora 40 or 41, went to Windows for a bit, got bored of it, and started looking into other different OSs
  • Found FreeBSD 14.1 :p (Arch Linux install process + years of Xorg and different DE experience helped a ton getting an initial Xfce set-up)
Windows, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and FreeBSD are the OSs I mess with nowadays. openSUSE TW rolls, has good QA, traditional (ext4, non-Atomic, no Flatpak enforcement), and provides the best GNOME experience within that while being easy to install the OS consistently server and workstation!

oS TW also has Packman essentials repo for multimedia (I prefer it over Fedora's RPM Fusion; Ubuntu just-having it is nicer though), and Wine Staging in oS's repo updates more frequently and quicker than both Fedora's own and WineHQ upstream's Fedora repo.

Alain De Vos said:
For me, some distro's died after upgrade after some time for no reasonable reason and no way to recover.
Click to expand...
Do you have a specific example?
 
In the mid-90s, I tried Corel Linux, WinLinux, Red Hat, S.u.S.E., probably Slackware and Debian. S.u.S.E. was the winner. I can’t even remember why.
 
I started with Mandrake 8.0 (Traktopel), but that was at $DAYJOB; I found one decommissioned RIP in the storage and made netatalk/samba server out of it. Company wanted to buy Xserve, but when they saw how well Mandrake served its purpose, they dropped order. Apple dealer hated me so much, LOL.

Somewhere around ~2005/06 I found FrenzyBSD, .ua made LiveCD which helped me solve problem which Hiren couldn't. I was amazed with it and soon after installed FreeBSD 6 on my desktop, and since FreeBSD is my main OS.

Only since beginning of this year I got curious about Linux again and installed Alt Sisyphus on external USB3 drive. I have there bunch of other distros as VMs, and more I learn about Linux ways more I love my FreeBSD.
 
Yes, I believe I've tried them all. 😆

But seriously, for long-term usage (rather than trying out as a live system), I first used Red Hat 5 (pre-RHEL and Fedora) around 1999-2000, Yellow Dog (who remembers that?), Mandrake, Ubuntu (Gnome 2 era), Mint, Debian for a long time, openSUSE, Mageia, Gentoo, Fedora, MX, Artix, Devuan, but mostly Slackware.

These days I try some live distros occasionally, but compared to using the BSDs, I'm just "meh" about Linux.
 
JWJones said:
Yes, I believe I've tried them all. 😆

But seriously, for long-term usage (rather than trying out as a live system), I first used Red Hat 5 (pre-RHEL and Fedora) around 1999-2000, Yellow Dog (who remembers that?), Mandrake, Ubuntu (Gnome 2 era), Mint, Debian for a long time, openSUSE, Mageia, Gentoo, Fedora, MX, Artix, Devuan, but mostly Slackware.

These days I try some live distros occasionally, but compared to using the BSDs, I'm just "meh" about Linux.
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I use freebsd. But also Linux. Why some very nice software have linuxism in it. They only work on linux. Simple example the haxe language. Or the vscode f#,scala plugins.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Currently using manjaro. It's like arch. Works fine but no zfs.
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Alt Sisyphus comes with zfs kernel module in their default repo. Although, only for 6.12.x, I don't see it in 6.15|16, but I'm using 6.12.43 anyway because nvidia module is also not available for 6.15|16
 
Just recently finished jumping. Tired. Waste of time.
If something is not working critically (government programs, tax, pension fund under Windows), there is a brick in the form of a disk with Windows 11.
I don't need this whole systemd_sex_shop anymore.
I downloaded and looked at the last distribution a week ago - СacheOS. Deleted after 24 hours of research.
СacheOS optimized and custom for games, etc.
I don't need it. Well, and a poorly studied systemd - as the main criterion for deleting all systemd distributions.
 
The only Linux distros I've been able to install are Ubuntu and Mint. I tried something in 2004 but there were issues I do not recall and that led to me installing FreeBSD. More recently I tried installing Arch and Gentoo but both installation docs are so convoluted I gave up on them. Have had no interest since.

EDIT: I forgot about centOS. I had to use that for one customer for a project. If I had to use Linux, centOS was the one I would use but, alas, ....
 
Arch isn't that convoluted, though I do think they make it more convoluted than it needs to be. I don't know about Gentoo now. Daniel Robbins wrote (and probably still writes) great documentation--I've always felt that was one reason Gentoo became popular back then, because his documentation made something fairly complex pretty easy to do. (He's not with Gentoo these days). I have a bunch of VMS that I hardly use, just to see if any of it's interesting. I like Alpine and Void, I also use Fedora a lot even though I think RH is the MS of Linux, if putting together something for a Windows user I use Mint. I have a friend who loves Arch and Gentoo because he feels that they don't do anything to upstream packages--that is, if you install an Arch package, it's pretty much what they did upstream, whereas Debian or Fedora do a bit of mucking around with their packages. He also loves systemd though, so, I don't really trust his judgement. :)

I will say with Arch, that you can easily mess up an install if you don't read the installation docs carefully--trouble is, some of the info is under their grub pages, some under their network pages, etc., but if you're familiar with it, you can get it installed pretty quickly. Not as quick as Alpine though, which takes about 3 minutes.
 
scottro said:
I don't know about Gentoo now. Daniel Robbins wrote (and probably still writes) great documentation--I've always felt that was one reason Gentoo became popular back then, because his documentation made something fairly complex pretty easy to do. (He's not with Gentoo these days).
Click to expand...
Never tried Arch, but I do like playing with Gentoo VMs (I have amd64, i686 and aarch64 QEMU VMs). IDK how was before with Gentoo docs, but nowadays for a newbie like me it was clear enough. Even if some instructions are not to be taken literary, thanks to my FreeBSD experience I was able to figure out what they meant/wanted to say.
 
My first encounter with Linux was with Slackware 3.0 in 1996 I believe, a cdrom was included in Byte magazine and I was intrigued by the fact that I could install a Unix OS on my PC, like the servers in the university lab.

Then I went through all the usual suspects, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe (OpenSuSe wasn't a thing at that time), Debian. I then moved to Arch in 2012 and I had always had my main machine on Arch until June 2024, when I moved to FreeBSD.

On my secondary machines I also tried Devuan, AntiX, CachyOS, RHEL, Linux Mint, OpenSuSe and probably many other distributions.

Since my daughter's laptop died a few months ago I installed W11 one of my secondary machines and gave it to her; as the other laptop I have is currently my testbed for the BSDs, this is the first time in almost thirty years I don't have a Linux machine in my stable.

At work is a different story, we have thousands of RHEL installations.
 
Started with Redhat 4.2 in 1997, did my RHCE but got worn down with rpm dependency hell, then moved onto SuSE briefly where I got tired of yast breaking. Stuck with Gentoo till 2016 when systemd became the thing and abandoned linux completely for bsd. A year or so ago I picked up on Debian where I discovered rsyslog could block obfuscated logging which was my main bugbear with systemd as I find it ok as a purely init system as journald is just an unholy mess. Never really been one for hopping round them all and prefer to actually learn the intricacies of one. Currently running Debian Sid with ZFS on root.
 
scottro said:
I will say with Arch, that you can easily mess up an install if you don't read the installation docs carefully--trouble is, some of the info is under their grub pages, some under their network pages, etc.,
Click to expand...
That's what I was talking about. I had to keep bouncing around different areas of the docs to the point where I'd forget where I was or where I needed to go next.
 
Not much.

My biggest "hop" was from Solaris to FreeBSD about 7 years ago. My Linux use is fairly insignificant compared to macOS and FreeBSD (and even illumos).

At home I've used Kubuntu a little bit, SUSE and OpenSUSE a fair but but almost all of my home Linux use has been Fedora. Mainly cos at work I've been using RHEL and derivatives for the past 12 years or so.

Almost forgot, I occasionally boot Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi OS on my RPi. I really hate GNOME on Ubuntu. And Debian based Raspberry Pi OS is just awful. Everything is obsolete and broken.
 
Circa 1997-1998, started with Redhat(4.2 ?) for a bit, then moved to TurboLinux and then Slackware.

Circa 2001 a friend brought a CD labeled FreeBSD 4.0 and what intrigued me was the demon mascot :>

And I thought this must be the OG OS to use..I tried it, the more I used it the more I liked it.. at the time I was also participating in the 6BONE IPv6 testbed and the KAME stack on FreeBSD seemed superior..

FreeBSD was my daily driver for a few years, then I switch to NetBSD, OpenBSD and back to FreeBSD.

Now I run Win10(debloated, single-stack IPv6) on my laptop and FreeBSD on all my VPS's.
 
In the beginning some of the early distributions like Slackware and Suse that required specific hardware like soundblaster cards, but started FreeBSD at 3.x or so.
Now, "Linux Distro Hopping" is reduced to "what does $WORK need me to be working with".

Honestly Linux Distros fall into "RedHat-ish" things and "Debian based". Beyond that it's what DE is installed by default and how much systemd is mandated. If I really had to depend on a Linux thing, I'd pick something Debian based, with minimal systemd requirements, no default DE/WM installed. Not sure which one that is, but that's what I'd look for
Alain De Vos said:
Lets defriantiate beween O.S.es and desktops.
Click to expand...
Well, technically "Linux" is just the kernel, so you need to define "what is an OS".
 
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